Thursday, February 1, 2018

Remembering Sheldon Meyer – Jazz Editor

“Sheldon Meyer, a
distinguished editor of nonfiction books who was almost single-handedly
responsible for the Americanization of Oxford University Press in his more than
40 years there, died on Oct. 9 [2006] at his home in
Manhattan. He was 80….

Mr. Meyer … made Oxford a
major publisher of books about American popular culture — notably jazz and
musical theater — and in so doing helped democratize scholarly publishing in
the United States….

In Mr. Meyer’s early years
with Oxford,
he sometimes had trouble persuading dusty dons across the Atlantic
that baseball and Basie were fit subjects for a European publishing concern
founded in 1478.

‘Now they’re tremendously
supportive,” Mr. Meyer told The New York Times in 1988. “They’re delighted
because the books do well and they reflect well on American culture. The whole
field now has an aura of respectability about it.’”

- Margalit Fox, The New York Times, October
18, 2006

"I had an advantage in
staying at one place for forty years. I never could have done the jazz list if
I was moving around to three or four publishers during that period. It is kind
of an extreme irony that the greatest university press in the world, with these
high standards, should become the major publisher of jazz, broadcasting,
popular music, all these areas. But I was there at the right time and I had a
group of people at the press who had enough flexibility and understanding to
let it go forward. Now everybody is enormously proud of this whole thing. I
couldn't ask for a better career."

- Sheldon Meyer as told to Gary Giddins

“I have a huge library of
books on jazz and popular music. Probably half of them were published by
Sheldon and Oxford.
To contemplate the condition in which the documentation of jazz and American
popular culture would be in had Sheldon Meyer never lived is a gloomy act
indeed. …

It is in this light that the
great body of Sheldon Meyer's work must be seen. And no one has ever more fully
embodied the dictum that an institution is the lengthened shadow of one man
than Sheldon Meyer. What the world of jazz owes him is beyond estimate, and
most of its denizens don't even know his name.”

- Gene Lees, Jazz author

It is tremendously
limiting and very unfair of me to refer to the late, Sheldon Meyer solely as a
“Jazz Editor,” but I like to think of him that way, that is when I’m not
thinking of him as “Sheldon Meyer – Baseball Editor” [another of my favorite
subjects].

While doing some
research for an upcoming book review of Alyn Shipton’s “Hi-De-Ho: The Life of Cab
Calloway” [published by Oxford University Press in 2010 and now
available in paperback], I came across the following piece about Mr. Meyer
which the late, author Gene Lees issued in the March, 1998 edition of his Jazzletter.

I thought
perhaps that readers of the blog might
be interested in the following excerpts from Gene’s view of Mr. Meyer’s
significance to Jazz publications during the second half of the 20th
century.

Few have placed a
larger footprint on the written documentation of and opinions about Jazz than
Mr. Meyer. Not surprisingly, it was he
who suggested that Mr. Shipton write the biography of Cab Calloway for Oxford
University Press.

If you stay with Gene’s
essay to the end, not only will you have learned more about a great man – Mr.
Sheldon Meyer – but you may also find yourself shedding a tear or two about the
current and future state of Jazz research and documentation.

“Something
catastrophic for jazz has happened in New York. I refer to the retirement at the age of
seventy of Sheldon Meyer.

Sheldon Meyer,
until recently senior vice president of Oxford University Press, is one of the
most important men in jazz history, and if in fifty years various persons are
researching this music in this time, they will be deeply in debt to him; and
probably they will never have heard of him. He is a tall, indeed imposing, man
with a round face, remarkably smooth and youthful skin, and equally youthful
manner and bearing. He has a droll sense of humor, a quick laugh, and a
remarkable lack of pretension for one whose career has been so creative and
important.

Gary Giddins recently
wrote in the New York Times Book Review: "'Midlist' is an industry
euphemism for those writers who do not scale best-seller charts.

"Until the
recent spate of articles about the woes of publishing, it never would have
occurred to me that I was a midlist author. I write books about jazz, and from
where I sit, midlist sounds like a promotion. Yet, along with several
colleagues, I have never felt professionally marginalized in the publishing
world, and for that we have one man to thank. On the occasion of his retiring
from Oxford University Press, Sheldon Meyer merits, at the very least, a
flourish of saxophones, a melody by Jerome Kern and a high-kicking chorus line
salute. Over the past forty years, Meyer turned the world's oldest and most
staid publishing house into the leading chronicler of jazz, Broadway musicals,
popular-song writers, broadcasting, and black cultural history. And he and his
masters made money at it."

A small number of
editors have achieved great prominence, among them Harold Ross of the New
Yorker and Maxwell Perkins, who brought to the world Ernest Hemingway, Thomas
Wolfe, and others of that stature in the time when fiction still held sway as
the major literary act. I think Sheldon's name, in the non-fiction area,
belongs at that level.

Sheldon spent the
first few years of his career at Funk and Wagnall's, joining Oxford in 1956. Funk and Wagnall's had published
Marshall Stearns' pioneering The Story of Jazz. Through Stearns,
Sheldon met Martin Williams, who was to become a friend and adviser, as well as
writing a number of books published by Oxford. At Oxford Sheldon published Gunther
Schuller's Early Jazz, which, as Gary Giddins points out, "remains
the most important musicological statement on jazz's infancy."

I came to know Sheldon
through James Lincoln Collier, whom I also did not know at the time. Writers
about jazz are often notable for an ill-concealed jealousy and a sullen
conviction that they alone know anything about the subject, that it is or
should be their exclusive domain. Collier proved to be an outstanding
exception. He had read some of the Jazzletters and told Sheldon about me,
saying, "You should be publishing this guy." Then he wrote me a
letter saying he thought Sheldon Meyer at Oxford University Press would be
receptive to a collection of my essays. It was an act of generosity that would
change my life.

I wrote to Sheldon
Meyer, who had published several collections of the exquisite word portraits of
Whitney Balliett. Quite timidly, I began by saying, "I am well aware that
collections of essays don't sell." And I got back a letter saying,
somewhat testily, "Mine do." He said he would very much like to
consider a collection of my pieces. After reading a number of them, he told me
on the telephone, "You have a reputation as a songwriter and as an expert
on singing. I think our first collection — " and I nearly choked on that
word first " — should be about
songwriting and singers." It became Singers and the Song (a title he
gave it) and it would win the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award. So would another
collection of my work that Sheldon would publish, Waiting for Dizzy. (I've
won it three times. Gary Giddins has the record: he's won it five times.)

In addition,
Sheldon published my Meet Me at Jim and Andy’s, Cats
of Any Color, and Leader of the Band: The Life of Woody Herman,
and Singers
and the Song II, due out in June — an expanded and altered version of
the first book. He published Jim Collier's biographies of Louis Armstrong,
Benny Goodman, and Duke Ellington. He published Ted Gioia's West Coast Jazz and, more recently, The
History of Jazz, and two books by bassist Bill Crow, Jazz Anecdotes and From
Birdland to Broadway, after reading some of Bill's delightful pieces is
the Jazzletter.

Sheldon published
Reid Badger's A Life in Ragtime: A Biography of James Reese Europe', King of Ragtime:
Scott Joplin and His Era by Edward A. Berlin; Philip Furia's The
Poets of Tin Pan Alley (the best book on lyrics and lyricists I've ever
read) and Ira Gershwin: The Art of the Lyricist; Joseph P. Swain's The
Broadway Musical; Mark Tucker's The Duke Ellington Reader, The
Jazz Scene by W. Royal Stokes; Arnold Shaw's The Jazz Age; Gene
Santoro's Dancing in Your Head and Stir It Up; The Frank Sinatra Reader
by Steven Petkov and Leonard Mustazz; Bebop by Thomas Owens; The
Jazz Revolution by Kathy I. Ogren; Too Marvelous for Words: The Life and Genius
of Art Tatum, by James Lester; Ira Gitler's Swing to Bop; Leslie Course's Contemporary
Women Instrumentalists, and many more, including a new encyclo­pedia of
jazz, on which Leonard Feather and Ira Gitler were working when Leonard died. Ira is
completing it.

And Sheldon
commissioned and published American Popular Song by Alec Wilder
and James Maher, one of the most important books in American musical history.

I have a huge
library of books on jazz and popular music. Probably half of them were
published by Sheldon and Oxford. To contemplate the condition in which the
documentation of jazz and American popular culture would be in had Sheldon
Meyer never lived is a gloomy act indeed. Most of those books would not have
found an outlet without him.

It is highly
unlikely that the standard "commercial" publishing houses would have
risked publishing such works, certainly the jazz books.

I once asked who
actually headed Oxford, and was told that it was a group of anonymous dons at the
university in England. I thought this was a joke; I learned that
while the statement may have been hyperbolic, it was not exactly untrue. There
is a certain amorphous quality about the upper level of Oxford University
Press, but Sheldon Meyer lent to his division dignity, direction, and decision.
When he started publishing books on jazz, his "masters," as Gary
Giddins called them, questioned him. As Sheldon told Gary:

"I had some
problems in the mid-60s. The head of the press in England said he had begun to notice some odd books
appearing in the Oxford list, and I said, well, I'm responsible for them. Since he was a
papyrologist — a guy working with old documents, old rolls of paper — he didn't
have much connection with this world, to say the least. So I said to him,
'Well, look, as long as these books are authoritative and make money, it seems
to me they're appropriate for the press to publish.' Fortunately for the future
of my career, that turned out to be correct."

Read between the
lines of that and you'll realize that Sheldon laid his career on the line to
publish books about jazz. Thus it came to be that probably the oldest
publishing house in England became the premiere publishing house on
contemporary American culture.

As he told Gary
Giddins, "I had an advantage in staying at one place for forty years. I
never could have done the jazz list if I was moving around to three or four
publishers during that period. It is kind of an extreme irony that the greatest
university press in the world, with these high standards, should become the
major publisher of jazz, broadcasting, popular music, all these areas. But I
was there at the right time and I had a group of people at the press who had
enough flexibility and understanding to let it go forward. Now everybody is
enormously proud of this whole thing. I couldn't ask for a better career."

Sheldon Meyer has
been an editor of brilliance, and if there is such a thing in editing, even of
genius. I began to get a bad feeling a couple of years ago when his close
friend and long-time professional associate, Leona Capeless, one of the finest
copy editors I've ever known, retired from Oxford. And now that Sheldon too has
retired, my unhappy capacity to reach conclusions I don't like tells me that
much chronicling of American cultural history is never going to get done. The
loss to America and to the world is inestimable.

In the past few
years, I have been only too aware that primary sources of jazz history, and
popular-music history, are being lost to us. The great masters, the men who
were there, are slowly leaving us. I do not know who said, "Whenever
anyone dies, a library burns." But it is true: almost anyone's experience
is worth recording, even that of the most "ordinary" person. For the
great unknown terrain of human history is not what the kings and famous men did
— for much, though by no means all, of this was recorded, no matter how
imperfectly — but how the "common" people lived.

When Leonard
Feather first came to the United States from England in the late 1930s, he was able to know
most of his musical heroes, including Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton. By
the end of the 1940s, Leonard knew everybody of significance in jazz from the
founding figures to the young iconoclasts. And when I became actively involved
in the jazz world in 1959, as editor of Down Beat, most of them were still
there. I met most of them, and became friends with many, especially the young
Turks more or less of my own age. I have lived to see them grow old (and
sometimes not grow old), and die, their voices stilled forever. And so, in
recent years, I have felt impelled to do what I can to get their memories down
before they are lost, leading me to write what I think of as mini-biographies
of these people. This has been the central task of the Jazzletter. And always
underlying my efforts in the past ten years has been the quiet confidence that,
thanks to Sheldon, these works would end up between hard covers on library
shelves for the use of future music historians. That is no longer so.

When I wanted to
know something about one aspect or another of music history in the 1960s, I
could pick up the telephone and call these older mentors, such as Alec Wilder
or my special friend Johnny Mercer, or Robert Offergeld, music editor of Stereo
Review when I wrote for it and one of the greatest scholars I have ever
known. If I wanted to know something about the history or the technique of film
composition, I could telephone my dear, dear friend Hugo Friedhofer, who wrote
his first film music in 1929. There was nothing worth knowing about film music
that Hugo didn't know; and not much for that matter about the history of all
music. I can't call Hugo any more. Or Dizzy. I can't call Glenn Gould either.
Gerry Mulligan was ten months older than I. Shorty Rogers died while I was researching the Woody
Herman biogra­phy; I was to interview him in a week or two.

Now, when my
generation is gone, there will be no one much left who knew Duke Ellington and
Woody Herman and Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins. All future writers will be
depen­dent not on primary sources, which all of these people were for me, but
on secondary sources, which is to say documents. And earlier writings. And I
have found much of the earlier writing on jazz, such as that of John Hammond
and Ralph J. Gleason, to be unreliable — sloppy in research, gullible in
comprehension, and too often driven by personal and even political agendas.
Errors — and lies — reproduce themselves in future writings.

It is in this
light that the great body of Sheldon Meyer's work must be seen. And no one has
ever more fully embodied the dictum that an institution is the lengthened
shadow of one man than Sheldon Meyer. What the world of jazz owes him is beyond
estimate, and most of its denizens don't even know his name.

Sheldon continues
as a consultant to Oxford, completing projects he initiated. But no writer who has dealt
with him thinks Oxford will continue developing these hugely significant projects. And
therefore much of jazz and popular-music history is going to go unrecorded,
lost forever. We are fortunate, however, that Sheldon Meyer managed to get as
much of it preserved as he did.

The Gospel of Jazz According to Art Blakey

"Anyone who has gone through Life and missed this music has missed out on one of the best things about LIVING."

- Richard Sudhalter, Jazz cornetist, author and critic

“Jazz musicians are their music. Absent that, they're just people making a living, eating meals, paying bills — no different from cops or politicos. But that's just the point: the music can't be subtracted: it's the defining essence, which sets musicians apart, makes them special and ultimately a little mysterious. Makes their various complexes and misbehaviors interesting to writers, chroniclers, fans. Would British writer Geoff Dyer, for example, have found Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, Art Pepper, and the other walking pathologies celebrated in his BUT BEAUTIFUL (Farrar, Straus, 1996) so fascinating had it not been for the music they made? Subtract the music and you have just another chronicle of aberrant thought and behavior. In a review of his book, I wondered whether Dyer would have been similarly drawn to musicians such as Henry “Red” Allen, Dizzy Gillespie, and Red Norvo, no less brilliant, who seem to have led balanced, eminently non-neurotic lives.”

Writerly Attributes According to Gary Giddins

"Insight, Candor, Observation, Discernment, Delineation, Style, Diligence, and Purpose:" What we strive to achieve on these pages. - The Editorial Staff at JazzProfiles

JazzProfiles

This blog is my gift to my friends.

Geugie Hoogeveen's Gift to JazzProfiles and Its Readers [Listeners?]

Hi Steven, You don't know me - and I don't really know you, but I’ve been enjoying your Jazz Profiles blogspot for some time now. (Specifically the recent Roy DuNann piece..) So first of all: thanks for that! Secondly, the reason for me writing you is that I’ve been quite busy organizing my jazz collection and have compiled and uploaded a handful of homemade radio shows on the podcast platform Mixcloud. Initially this was a project intended for Izaak, my son, who’s only two years old right now, but I think they’d be quite interesting for any true classic bop and hard bop jazz lovers. Problem is; nobody's listening to them.. I thought, if you shared my enthusiasm, they perhaps could be linked somehow to your blogspot.. But only if you think that’s appropriate. Two important notes: 1: there’s absolutely no commercial incentive involved here 2: the podcasts are a hundred percent non stop music, so no talking, jingles or add’s etc. Check them out, if you have the time. Right now there are five compilations, each one focussing on on a major jazz label, so there’s Prestige, Blue Note, Savoy, Riverside and Contemporary for now. Ok, so that’s basically it.. Thanks for taking the time and let me know what you think.. Kind regards, Geugie Hoogeveen the Netherlands